Academics have discovered PowerPoint en masse, apparently, which I take as another sign of the impending apocalypse. Oh, to be sure, PowerPoint was used by a small number of academics, but now it seems to have spread throughout and is being used by EVERYbody…years and years after it became cliche in the applied/real world.
So, it is inevitable that the same sins that have been committed before – too much text, unreadable tables, overuse of animation – are also to be seen among denizens of the academy. I recently saw a professor-created presentation that added unnecessary text to an outline, jammed in unreadable bar graphs, and even had a footnote.
My own style tends toward the spartan, itself not the best practice, but definitely the lesser of two evils.
Somewhere, Edward Tufte is crying…or perhaps:
(h/t Mark Goetz)
